Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - At a public meeting Tuesday night at the Seeley Lake Elementary School, a sizable crowd gathered to make their thoughts and feeling known about the purchase of the iconic Holland Lake Lodge to POWDR, a Utah-based recreation company.

Facilitated by the U.S. Forest Service, Tamara McKenzie began with the basic facts of the project.

A Private Business with a Forest Service Permit

“This is a private business that has a Forest Service permit to operate on Forest Service Land,” McKenzie said. “The Forest Service does not own the buildings and they are authorized to operate on the Forest Service land. The other thing is that there's a lot of other businesses it's you may know like outfitting and guide services that are all private. They all go through this very similar process. Residences would go through this process to make any improvements or changes to their operating plan. So that's the process that I'm going to discuss tonight.”

Communications Director for POWDR, Stacey Hutchinson spoke to the gathering and first attempted to dispel some misinformation about the Holland Lake Lodge process.

Click the website to get Questions Answered

“I'll share two points of information with you right now,” began Hutchinson. “One is a website that we have set up to hopefully dispel some of the misinformation out there. It will help to clear up some of the myths and share what we are going to do and share what we're not going to do. That website is Holland Lake future.com. So I encourage everybody to visit there. There's also an area at the bottom of the homepage. If you scroll all the way down that you can send in comments and they'll come to all of us at POWDR so we can see each and every one of them.”

No Ski Resort and No Helicopter Skiing

Hutchinson was also forthright in dispelling one of the concerns expressed recently by the Center for Biological Diversity about possible helicopter skiing that would endanger critical grizzly bear and fish habitats.

“We're going to be putting in a lot of ‘dark sky friendly’ operations to make sure that we're preserving the beauty that is on the Holland Lake Lodge,” she said. “So a couple of things that we're not doing that I think are really important to clarify. We're not installing ski lifts or a ski hill, there will not be helicopter skiing, there will not be helicopters and there will not be motorized boats in the lake and we will not be renting those to our guests.”

If all goes according to plan and the project moves forward on schedule, the POWDR project will be opening as of March, 2023.

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